Posted 27 Jun 2019 by
adrianxw
The part you need to understand is :
>>> Multithreading is only practical for certain types of problem. Applied to the wrong system, it can cause an increase in run time.
I presented a stupid example of where multithreading a task can make it run slower.
My old website had a tutorial about multithreading, it uses a very silly program as the teaching tool, and I wrote it almost two decades ago, so some things might be different now. The way back machine has the tutorial here :
https://archive.org/web/web.php
...then ...
search for adrianxw.dk
...then ...
click the most recent date, 15th Feb then click "Enter software site". Parts 1, 2 and 3 of the basic tutorial are on the list there. Watch them in order.
I've not used that site for years, but it seems to work anyway.
Posted 11 Jun 2019 by
adrianxw
Multithreading is only practical for certain types of problem. Applied to the wrong system, it can cause an increase in run time.
An extremely crude example, suppose you have a task which does a loop, each iteration of the loop adds 1 to the total, you have to iterate the loop 10 times to get the answer. Simple enough to do, but how could you multi-thread that? Each time it goes through the loop, it needs to know the result of the last pass through the loop, so thread 2, can't start until thread 1 is finished, etc, until it is complete. The act of starting the threads, passing the data, recovering the results, all add to the run time.
The current units run in about three hours on my i7-6700 systems running Windows 8.1.
Posted 10 Jun 2019 by
adrianxw
Comments in this thread...
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=12700
... may be of interest in this respect. Go for it, most crunchers have a list of projects they support, if one or two only supply a couple of workunits a week, well, no harm done is there.
Posted 9 Jun 2019 by
adrianxw
That would alert current BOINCers, sure, but the real point is to get more BOINCers into the mix. I've found that most people that see "something odd" running on my computers, ask me about it, and once explained, they are keen to get going themselves.
I tend to trawl the list at boincstats.com every few months to see if any new projects have arisen. The BOINC pages say "about 30" projects to choose from, but boincstats lists 50 actives.
Posted 9 Jun 2019 by
adrianxw
>>> we definetely need to gain computing power somewhere
I wonder how many times that has been said by the folk at the various projects!
I think one of the biggest problems is that the projects and BOINC in general, are not well known. I sent e-mails to the companies that do the "after the news" evening chat shows suggesting a five minute slot to push BOINC generally, but never had a reply.
Another problem I discovered is the licensing of BOINC, it contains wording with warnings saying that it "has never caused problems", "used without issue by millions", etc. etc. I tried to get permission from the local council to put BOINC on the general purpose computers in the local library, they refused saying they could not trust it because of this, rather soft, wording. I could assure the council it was harmless as I'd never had any trouble with it, or the older Seti@Home that was the predecessor of BOINC in the last centuary, but that is just me.
Posted 21 May 2019 by
adrianxw
Something to remember with research, is that it is rarely possible to say in advance, how long, how many, how much etc. What tends to happen is that a project starts with a good idea of where it is going, but as the results start drifting back, some suprises appear, these can lead to additional types of jobs, different techniques etc. If you look at the history of other BOINC projects, you will see this again and again.
Posted 16 Mar 2019 by
adrianxw
I notice the project is not on the list of projects here:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php
Posted 4 Jan 2019 by
adrianxw
You are, indeed, quite correct. I found the item and have adjusted it. What a ridiculous state of affairs. Thanks for the heads up.
Posted 31 Dec 2018 by
adrianxw
On my home page, at the bottom, is a list of other projects I am or have crunched. I noticed that Einstein was missing from that list.
Posted 3 Jan 2017 by
adrianxw
Fine, your project, your choice. You also understand there are costs. I've set no new tasks and will detatch when those here are cleared. Best wishes.
Posted 2 Jan 2017 by
adrianxw
Well, as admin, you now know the consequence of having the invitation code. You can't expect team admins to push your project.
Posted 2 Jan 2017 by
adrianxw
At other "new" projects, teams are imported at project set up time. I am the founder of many of our team instances, yet have not created teams at dozens of projects.
Posted 2 Jan 2017 by
adrianxw
I just tried to join our team, click on the "find a team" link, enter Denmark in the Country field, and it shows "No teams were found matching your criteria. Try another search." BOINC@Denmark is the largest Danish team and appears at all other projects. The search cannot find ANY teams in Denmark, (there are several).
Posted 2 Jan 2017 by
adrianxw
I tried to attatch my account to our regular team, but trying to do so didn't work, it said it couldn't find my team, or, in fact, any teams.